Standing Firm: The Tarmail Mail Server

Version 1.0.0 of the Tarmail mail server has just been released. The developers claim that their software is particularly resilient against exploits, spam and email worms.

To achieve this, the developers have adopted a strict interpretation of the SMTP protocol based on RFC 2821. This gives them the ability to reject undesirable mail in the SMTP dialog. Among other things, this involves strict syntax checking for commands. At the same time, administrators can block IP addresses or deploy graylists. Each user has a personal whitelist and blacklist for email senders. In addition, the SMTP server is resilient against dictionary attacks.

Tarmail is written in C; the developers try to support as many Unix-style systems as possible. The server source code is available from the Tarmail homepage and can be built and deployed on many Linux distributions, including Fedora 7 and Ubuntu 7.04. The software is licensed under the GPL Version 2.